Not educating girls is not the only myth about Pashtuns: Pashtun mothers produce sons so that they can send them to war; fathers will shoot their daughters if a stranger sees their faces. Of course, as the myth goes, they also don't want to send their daughters to schools. And why do they need to send their sons to school anyway, if they are born soldiers in an eternal jihad? But there was no evidence of any such Pashtun culture in the Swat valley I had visited the day before our conversation....

The association of the early Patiala masters with the Chishti Sufis is reflected in the lyrics of their many compositions but perhaps most clearly in what to me is their magnum opus, the raga Ram Saakh. The legend has it that performing the Khayal ‘piya tore nain’ in the elaborate, ornate and highly complex Ram Saakh, the Patiala pioneer Ali Bakhsh Khan beat a sarangi player Mirch Khan — so named for his fast pace — at the Maharajah’s court....

My sense of historical linguistics led me to believe that Urdu is at the heart of India's lingua franca, structurally being akin to Hindi and Hindustani, my faith in the composite cultural genius of Urdu never faltered. Unfortunately, Urdu had been the victim of politicization and communalization. This has created difficulties for Urdu in India, but Urdu being a dynamic language has been coping rather well with the changing reality….

Trapped in a medieval mindset, most madrasas in India abhor change. Little wonder then that the state government’s recent proposal to bring madrasas into the mainstream through monetary aid is set to be rebuffed, especially by the Deobandi group. Overloaded as it is with Islam—Islamic jurisprudence, Islamic philosophy, Quran and Hadith—the madrasa curriculum turns students into Maulvis who are largely unemployable and unemployed in the mainstream job market....

More than the ulema and the clerics, it was the Sufi saints who made the foremost social contribution to the spreading of Islam in the region. The saints’ interpretation of Islam was more accommodating. Consequently, over the centuries a largely permissive culture of devotional music and indigenously cultivated rituals began taking shape around and inside the shrines....

A leaf from a Persian manuscript of Sa’adi’s Golestan (Rose Garden) signed by the famous Mahmud Mozahheb and dated 968 (1560-1561 A.D.) rose to a gigantic £313,250, more than doubling expectations. A painter and illuminator from Herat, Mahmud had been forcibly taken by the Uzbek invaders to Bokhara, the seat of their Sheybanid dynasty. The Sheybanid ruler was eager to build the Central Asian city into an up-to-date Iranian-style capital of the arts....

An Israeli born musician alternately played the acoustic guitar and a Bansuri (flute) accompanied by two gypsy folksingers who played the Harmonium, Table and traditional Rajasthani instruments called Khirtal, Bhapand & Morchang .  This was Shye Ben Tzur with Kutle Khan and Chugge Khan straight from the deserts of Rajasthan singing Quawwali (a form of Sufi devotional from South Asia) in Hebrew and Urdu as they performed for the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto – their first performance in North America....

The only Begum Akhtar I was aware of, and here I feel like kicking myself for my imperfect education, was the queen of such old Ghazals as “Diwana banana hai tu, diwana bana dena...” Then last week, travelling the net, the addiction of our times, I stumbled across a concert performance of the Begum singing Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Aaye kuch abr kuch sharab aaye, uss ke baad aaye jo azaab aaye” and I have been in a trance ever since....

Whether it is Arab, American or Asian, this still largely clandestine medium of expression remains one of art's most controversial forms. While Arab graffiti are moving towards becoming an acceptable form of art in Tunisia, they are fighting a tougher battle on the streets of Cairo and are still considered unwelcome in other Arab countries, if not judged as an act of outright vandalism....

In accordance to a revelation by the angel Gabriel to the Holy Prophet (PBUH), the Sufis believe that they are practicing Ihsan (perfection of worship), as Gabriel had decreed to the Prophet: “Worship and serve Allah as you are seeing Him and while you see Him not yet truly He sees you.” Classical Sufi scholars have defined Sufism as “a science whose objective is the reparation of the heart and turning it away from all else but God”....

With Ramadan on the horizon, followed by the Eid al-Adha holiday, including the sacrificial slaughter of sheep by millions of Muslims worldwide, it is important not to underestimate the importance meat has, and has had, in Arab/Islamic culture. The ancient Egyptians, for instance, kept cows in one of the first massive domestication efforts. Another aspect of meat culture in the Arab world is social class....

The belief that this ‘religious linguistic propriety’, which includes the introduction of ‘Allah Hafiz’ and ‘Ramadan’ in Pakistan’s lingual fashion, began with Zia’s campaign of cultural Islamisation does hold some truth. It has inevitably led to these (words, phrases) to be seen symbolic of the infamous general’s Islamification drive or ‘Saudisation ‘of Pakistan;....

In the 1800s, crowds regularly gathered on the steps of the Jama Masjid mosque in New Delhi to enthusiastically watch a “Dastango,” or storyteller, narrate tales of fantasy without props, music or theatrical action. The magic that held the audience was created with his voice and the stories themselves, which were mainly told in Urdu. The art form almost died out in the 1900s, the victim of radio, film and television....

Does it matter what name people use for God? This is the question thrown up as a result of a strange development in Pakistani etiquette. Until about 10 years ago "Khuda hafiz", which means "God protect you", was the phrase commonly used to say goodbye. But, in the past decade, "Khuda hafiz" began to be overtaken by a new term "Allah hafiz"....

Syria continues to burn and bleed, and there seems no sign of it all coming to an end. I can hardly recognize it from the current news reports, which seem to talk of a totally different country from the one I visited some twenty years ago. The remains of a wall dating back to Roman times, the Azam palace and the sprawling Roman-style Masjid Umaviya, a church later converted into a mosque after the seventh century Arab Muslim conquest and believed, by some, to house the head of John the Baptist, were among the major sites in Old Damascus....